Halcyon, You should make sure the broker you eventually choose lets you trade ENRNQ, KM and the like without extra cost. Sometimes they charge you more for penny-stocks or don't offer them at all. (I am assuming that your focus will be on penny-stocks since you are planning to start swingtrading with 5000-share lots and $25k.)
Halcyon, Please don't take it personally when people told you that "you will g*t ki***d " It's just that they (we) all did get killed and/or slaughter when we first started, and trading bring the best and the worst out of us... So when you mentionned your story, we all have a little flashback to our beginning days in trading, and emotions got gripped of us all. The posters here don't know you, they cannot judge on your trading, but one thing they can judge on is your thinking, they (we) had exactly the same line of thinking when we first got into this trading business. Whatever you decide to do, trading is fun and better than sex, but allow me to add something... If you had a written plan on what to do with the profits (buy a new DVD system, 40" TV...), please write another plan, in bigger letters, and on top of the previous plan, on what to do with the loss (and I am not being sarcastic here). Example : will you allow yourself to have a loss of 1000$ per week or more ? how about per month? ect.... With time, most will be able to trade 'appropriately', but it's the money management that will give you the time to get there. And of course, there is (are) no God/gods, however, there is Fibonacci ! Cheers!
Halcyon- don't worry about your big ego, the market will take care of that. It will humble you like you've never been before. My only concern is it seems you're not very flexable...I think you need to be more open to advice.because you're gonna have to be open to ideas if you really want to trade. and when someone said "you're gonna get killed", don't take it personally..you can't take trading personally... as far as brokers go..check out terranova.com ...i used them for a year..very little to complain about good luck!
Metoxx, oh so true! Smart people tend to think, rethink, analyse, reason, counter-reason, analyse some more, and conclude.... I know, I am one of them! and am trying my darnest to be a bit more dumb! A trader thinks, but doesn't think too much . You see what you see, and not what you think or want to see. Cheers !
We have lost more money on well thought out logical systems and tend to make more money on hacked together systems that we are not quite sure why they work.
Wow, I have never heard that before! I used to (and still do for fun) program systems for a living for a company that traded futures. We tested a shit load of them - 99.999% of what is out there is worthless. We did put together one or two that worked, but we understood (in theory) why it worked. nitro
I wish it was that simple, we trade 20+ systems at a time, one of our best performing system, had some bugs in the code that we found after 6 months, fixed them, got chopped up, put the old version back, works like a charm. Put up an option system, based on valuation, probably the most researched, proven system we ever developed, chopped to pieces. You never know, and I guess I am old enough to realize I don't have to.
A lot of it I believe is in the execution, back testing on historical data seems to not work as well as testing with real money. Ten years ago I would have argued the other side.